TODAY is a normal day.
While history is being made in polling booths, life will continue. Mothers will give birth, cars will crash, cancer patients will learn their latest results and elderly people will fall. NHS staff will find time to vote around their shifts, then get back to looking after people who will remember Thursday, September 18, 2014, for more than one reason.
It's been impossible to write about the health service in recent weeks without the story being seen to support a Yes or No vote. The facts can generally be adopted to support either case, depending on whether you believe the opportunities to increase public-sector spending will be greater or more fragile in an independent Scotland.
However, the report compiled by NHS finance directors that shows £400 to £450 million of savings will have to be found in the next two years to prevent a massive overspend was not written for either campaign. It was written to discuss the reality of the money we know is likely to be available for the Scottish health service between 2015 and 2017 and the growing demands on it.
By playing with the words a little, you can make the details of this document - leaked to The Herald this week - sound better or worse than it really is. Herein lies the danger, for while that goes on the difficult decisions about which is calls for discussion lay unconsidered.
Alex Salmond on Good Morning Scotland talked of the £450m funding gap being the "efficiency savings" target the Scottish Government set the NHS, insisting the money will be reinvested in the frontline.
Sure, health boards are told to become more efficient to the tune of three per cent of their budget every year and in prosperous times that may release cash for improvements.
However, they can also meet the target on paper by being more productive, for example, getting more patients through an operating theatre in an afternoon. Furthermore, Audit Scotland found that in 2012-13 health boards' own calculations on how much they needed to shave from spending in order to break even after paying the bills was 3.1 per cent. So the equivalent of the "efficiency saving" money was needed to avoid going into the red. The leaked report shows the level of claw-back required to balance the books next year is 3.5 per cent.
It's a bit like a family saving £1000 every year to go on holiday. Then the household bills rise at the same time as dad's work cuts his annual pay rise and mum has to reduce her hours so she can visit her elderly mother. That £1000 goes on meeting expenses, which is OK, except the holiday made everyone feel less run down. The family think it might suit everyone better if they could buy a bigger house and let grandma move in, but even if this saves money later, they can't afford it now.
The point being that at a time when the NHS needs to change to look after the ageing population, money is tighter. Instead of dealing with that, it is being glossed over by politicians or used as ammunition to beat people who aren't to blame. Meanwhile more and more patients find themselves lying in wards and staff feel frustration.
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